"And all Israel shall hear, and fear, and shall do no more any such wickedness as this is among you."(84) 84) Deuteronomy xiii. The constantly recurring faithlessness of the Jews, their restlessness and proneness to wander from their one-principled deity which had been set up by their priests for them to worship, was doubtless an unconscious effort on the part of the people to mitigate the outrage which had been committed against their Creator. It was but a reaching out for that lost or unrecognized element which comprehends the more essential force both in human beings and in the conception of a deity. In other words, it was an attempt at recognition, in the objects worshipped, of that missing female element which had always been worshipped, and without which a Creator becomes a misnomer--a meaningless, unexplained, and unexplainable monstrosity. When the Jews first make their appearance in history, they are sun worshippers, as are all the nations by which they are surrounded. They are worshippers of Seth the Destroyer and Regenerator; but when the philosophical truths underlying the ancient universal religion were forgotten, or when through ignorance the language setting forth these mysteries was taken literally, Seth became identified with the Destroyer, or the Evil Principle. In the meantime man had come to believe himself the sole creator of offspring. He is spirit, which is eternal; woman is matter, which is not only destructible but altogether evil. He is heat or passion--the principle through which life is produced. She represents the absence of heat. She is the simoom of the desert and the chilly blast which destroys. That it was no part of their plan to change their original form of worship for a spiritual conception of a Creator is apparent from their history. On the contrary, it is plain that they desired simply to eliminate from the hitherto dual conception of a deity the female principle, which, in their arrogance, and because of the change which had been wrought in the relations of the sexes, they no longer acknowledged as important in the office of reproduction. It is quite true they would worship only one god--the "Lord,"--but that lord was, as we have seen, a deity of physical strength and virile might, a "Lord of Hosts," a god which was to be worshipped under the symbol of an upright stone--an object which by every nation of the globe down to a comparatively recent time has typified male pro-creative energy. That the masses of the people, even as late as the time of Jeremiah, had no higher conception of a God than that indicated by an upright stone, is shown by that prophet when he accuses the entire house of Israel, "their kings, their princes, and their priests, and their prophets," of "saying to a stock, Thou art my father; and to a stone, Thou hast brought me forth."